Define the cloud, and discuss its attributes

What will be an ideal response?

The cloud is defined as the elastic leasing of pooled computer resources over the Internet. The term cloud is used because most early diagrams of three-tier and other Internet-based systems used a cloud symbol to represent the Internet, and organizations came to view their infrastructure as being "somewhere in the cloud."
The term elastic means that the computing resources leased can be increased or decreased dynamically, programmatically, in a short span of time and that organizations pay for just the resources that they use.
Cloud resources are pooled because many different organizations use the same physical hardware; they share that hardware through virtualization.
The cloud resources are accessed over the Internet, which refers to a set of standard ways of requesting and receiving services over the Internet.